Hebe, Mayday, JJ Lin among winners of Taiwan's KKBOX awards

PHOTO: Warner Music

TAIPEI - Music streaming service KKBOX announced the winners of its 12th Annual KKBOX Music Awards during a preview event for the Jan. 21 award show.

Celebrity Mickey Huang, who hosted the preview event and who will be hosting the award show for the ninth time later in the month, announced the recipients of the KKBOX Music Awards, which included 10 awards for chart-topping artists, one award for an indie artist and one award for best new artist.

The KKBOX Indie Artist award went to No Party For Cao Dong and the Best New Artist award went to Under Lover.

The awards were given out based solely on the number of times the artists' songs were played on the music app throughout the past year, without a panel of judges or any other factor shaping the list of winners.

Della gave a special performance at the event on Monday and received her award ahead of time due to scheduling conflicts that rendered her unavailable to attend the award show on the day.

Novelties at the 12th Annual KKBOX Music Awards

Managing Director Alex Wang of KKBOX Asia Pacific announced a collaboration with Acer to provide both a 360-degree VR coverage of the award show to improve the viewing experience of audiences at home.

"You can choose the camera from which you want to watch," Wang said.

KKBOX is also hosting two additional concerts so that "the KKBOX Music Awards will no longer just be a three-and-a-half-hour award ceremony in the evening," Wang said.

"We want all our artists to have a great platform to perform," Wang said at a press event.

One concert, titled "Electronic's Night Out," will be on the night of Jan. 20 and will feature several famous local DJs.

The other concert is in the afternoon of the award show and will feature winners of national collegiate music competitions.

Looking Back and Ahead

During his speech, Managing Director Wang gave a recap of the company's biggest accomplishments in 2016.

"KKBOX now has over 30 million songs in its database," Wang said, adding that the music app incorporated information technology that recommended songs based on the user's music preferences "to help users navigate the giant database."

Through the wide range of platforms that can now access KKBOX - including smartphones, computers, TVs, stereos, and automobile dashboards - the number of times songs were played on KKBOX in 2016 rose to 11 billion times.

This marked a 25 per cent year-on-year growth from 2015, which saw songs being played 9 billion times on the app.

Wang said that KKBOX, keeping pace with the latest tech trends, hosted over 100 livestreamed concerts and music events throughout the year with about 2 million viewers.

Looking ahead, Wang said he wanted to see "20 per cent growth on all fronts," including the number of users, the frequency of use, and the number of songs played.

The managing director identified Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia as countries whose Chinese-speaking population the music app wanted to target.

"KKBOX is hoping to use these livestreamed events and concerts abroad featuring (KKBOX Music Awards) winners to attract more registered users from these regions," Wang told reporters.

The music app currently has a reported 2 million paying users, half of whom are users in Taiwan.